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You are here: Home / Navigation / Classifications or Taxonomies Explained

Classifications or Taxonomies Explained

Taxonomy is one of those words frequently used when talking about WordPress, but what does it actually mean?

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification of things or concepts

I don’t know about you, but in my daily speech I don’t use ‘taxonomy’ a lot. I do, however, have plenty of occasions to use the word ‘classifications’. For the purpose of simplicity let’s talk about classifications in WordPress.

Classifications (taxonomies) are used in WordPress as a way to group posts together. A powerful navigation tool! WordPress has two of these classification tools already built in to the structure : Categories and Tags. But first we’ll look at categories

Categories

Category is one of the pre-defined classifications in WordPress. It’s used to sort and group content into different sections. They’re like broader sections of a website.

Let’s say that I have a site about Decorating Your Home. What would my categories be? I imagine my categories would include Kitchen, Lounge, Bedroom. Then when I write a post about kitchen curtains, I would put that post into the Category ‘Kitchen’.

Every single post that you write needs a category. Tags are entirely optional.

Categories are meant for broadly grouping your content together. It’s best to have fewer than 10 categories on your site. Five is a good number.

Every post needs a category

If you don’t put a post into a category, it’s classified as – guess what – ‘uncategorised’. This makes for an untidy haphazard site and looks as if you’re an untidy haphazard person. How can a Reader find anything on a site if it’s full of uncategorised posts? It’s as if the site author didn’t know what the post was about or just didn’t care.

* Remember, categories aren’t set in concrete, you can change them at any time as your site grows, you can even delete them. It’s a good idea to examine your categories every year and see if they need revision. (I bet they will).

Tags

Tags are like keywords.

Let’s take that example of a website dedicated to Decorating Your Home. I’ve already written a post about kitchen curtains and I’ve put it into the category “Kitchen’. Now I’ll classify the post further. I’ll make a tag called ‘curtains’ on that post. So then when I write another post about drapes for the lounge (which I’ve placed into the category of ‘Lounge’) I can also add the tag ‘curtains’.

It’s all about Navigation

Sensible categories and tags make for easy navigation.

This post is classified in the category “Navigation’ and I have added the tags ‘categories’ and ‘tags’.

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